Real-time Simulation for Sustainable Production

Enhancing User Experience and Creating Business Value

Juhani Ukko, Minna Saunila, Janne Heikkinen, R.Scott Semken, Aki Mikkola, Juhani Ukko, Minna Saunila, Janne Heikkinen, R.Scott Semken, Aki Mikkola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000392203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

This book provides a comprehensive overview of potential opportunities and the business value position related to implementing physics-based real-time simulation to production. The objective of real-time simulation is to provide value for all three dimensions of sustainability: economic, social, and environmental.

By reviewing actual industrial cases and presenting relevant academic research, the book examines the topic from four interrelated viewpoints: the industrial need for sustainable production, the development of game-like virtual environments, capturing customer value and enhancing the user experience, and finally, establishing business value. It offers a framework that will enable a rethink and shift in mindset to appreciate how real-time simulation can change the way products are manufactured and services are produced.

This book will appeal to researchers and scholars in areas as diverse as strategic management, manufacturing and operations management, marketing, industrial economics, and product lifecycle management.

1

Creating value with sustainable production based on real-time simulation

Minna Saunila, Juhani Ukko, Janne Heikkinen, R. Scott Semken and Aki Mikkola

1.1 Introduction

There has been shift away from technology-driven design and production toward sustainable value creation (Kaewunruen & Lian, 2019; Ukko et al., 2019). Traditionally, product and service development decisions have been made by experts tasked with directly addressing development issues. Their decisions have been based, for the most part, on relevant technical aspects. The focus, however, is moving away from purely technical aspects and moving toward enhancing the user experience and customer value. To address this trend, many manufacturing companies are reconsidering and re-engineering their existing product processes so they can become more competitive.

Advanced and persistent usage of key enabling technologies will be fundamental to success, and as the new enabling technologies are implemented to provide future products and services, user and customer needs must be better addressed and increasingly fulfilled (cf., Jones et al., 2020; Ukko et al., 2020). Accordingly, product processes must be reconsidered so the broader spectrum of stakeholders – beginning with supply, encompassing all internal organizational functions, the user and ending with aspects of recycling or disposal – are closely engaged (Kokkonen et al., 2020; Nasiri et al., 2020). The critical task is to develop the necessary techniques and toolsets needed in design and manufacturing to enable new sustainable business opportunities.

Often, new products embedded with innovative digital solution functionalities such as Internet of Things (IoT) are verified and validated by building and testing prototypes. In general, the prototyping process includes detailed design, parts procurement, prototype assembly, verification and validation testing, results assessment, and redesign. Each step in this process consumes time, which delays the commercialization of new innovations, and money, which results in more expensive product development in which customer needs may not be completely fulfilled. On top of wasting time and money, in many cases the manufactured prototypes cannot be used, as such, in follow-on prototyping, which contradicts the idea of sustainable production. New digital approaches for the design, prototyping, and testing of new machines make it possible to account for human-interaction and customer needs early on in new product development. Getting the earliest possible feedback from the end user or any other stakeholder promises to significantly reduce costs while increasing sustainability in product and production processes and providing more configurable product families for multiple market niches (cf., Tao et al., 2019; Zhong et al., 2015 Zhou et al., 2020).

Digital design methods have been available and in use for decades. The computer-aided design tools have been available since the 1960s. The development of digital design tools has progressed from clumsy 2D blueprints to realistic 3D models that can enhance, for example, studies of manufacturability and assembly in engineering development and not on the factory floor.

Another level of advancement was achieved when static objectives were combined to form systems in which virtual parts could move relative to each other and accurately simulate the real machine behaviors of actual machine parts. It sounds simple, but on the theoretical level, this breakthrough required a comprehensive mathematical interpretation of the complete system. Armed with these models capable of accurately simulating real-life mechanisms, researchers have been able to come up with more advanced and sophisticated methods to describe the motions of the mechanisms.

Technical solutions driven by real-time simulation and digital twins based on real-time simulation are rapidly developing, and their application, from a technical point of view, is constantly becoming easier and more cost effective. However, meaningfully applying digital twins requires business understanding (Kokkonen et al., 2020; Qi et al., 2018). Digital twins based on real-time simulation need to enable new business, or at least enhance existing business processes, and therefore deliver value that is greater than the costs of their implementation. Consideration should be given to how the real-time simulation model can deliver significant business benefits over the traditional digital product development process. In the traditional digital product development process, there is no real-time utilization of the digital product model and product or system and the continuous linking of the collected information. Despite growing interest, there is lack of research on which characteristics of digital twins based on real-time simulation contribute to the different uses. In terms of new business opportunities, the whole concept needs further development.

This chapter describes research into physics-based real-time simulation from a business perspective and provides guidance for further studies. It addresses the following two questions:

• What is the meaning of real-time simulation in contemporary business practice?
• And, how does real-time simulation contribute to sustainable production?

The immediately following paragraphs present the potential of real-time simulation in sustainable production. Then, suggestions for future research are summarized.

1.2 Reflections on sustainable production based on real-time simulation

As already mentioned, digital tools enable more sustainable business operations (Saunila et al., 2019; Ukko et al., 2019). However, to dive deeper into value creation from digital methods, stakeholders of a company including managers, business owners, personnel, investors, and others must understand the state-of-art of available digital methods as well as the current company status with respect to the use of digital methods. Prerequisites for taking full advantage of digital tools include knowing and understanding existing capabilities and having the required human resources, calculation power, and software licenses. Digital models of the equipment that will be used to build value are also needed. In modern business operations, the digital models are already a part of the product management system. However, the digital model itself is only the first step toward creating tangible value out of the virtual counterpart of the physical systems.

As part of the research being reported in this book, representatives of several Finnish manufacturing companies from different industrial sectors were interviewed. These companies are in the frontline of taking the advantage of simulation tools for research and development, and simulation is a big part of their product development footprint. The company representatives interviewed included technical experts, already well aware of the advantages of simulation, as well as other non-technical stakeholders. These comprised business managers and decision-makers.

The diversity in the group of company experts made it possible to explore the bigger business perspective instead of just focusing on technical issues. The results of the interviews are reported in the chapters of this book. The main takeaways from the interviews were that the technical people do not have a clear idea of how simulation can be best applied to increase customer and company value. Moreover, the business managers and decision-makers do not understand how much potential for value creation the digital tools really have. It is an interesting situation that suggests there is an enormous business opportunity looming in the background.

The traditional way simulation is used as a digital counterpart of the physical system, especially in the earliest stages of product development. The benefits of exercising digital instead of real prototypes are easy to justify economically. However, from the technical perspective, they offer an even more significant advantage. A digital model can be adjusted, tested, and redesigned in a matter of hours, whereas the manufacture, testing, and redesign of a prototype take weeks and months. The ease with which a virtual prototype can be manipulated encourages engineers to be more creative and promotes the development of new innovations and methods. Innovations are naturally a key to success in the global marketplace, therefore modern simulation tools accelerate, both directly and indirectly, the overall sustainable growth of the companies that use them.

Simulation tools are also being used in sales...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• 1 Creating value with sustainable production based on real-time simulation
• Part I Industrial needs of sustainable production
• Part II Game-like virtual environments
• Part III Capturing customer value and user experience
• Part IV Value for business
• Index